


i came to win (and i won)

by paperclipbitch



Category: The Queen's Gambit (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Chess, Episode 6: Adjournment, F/M, References to Addiction, Thomas Brodie-Sangster my waifish trash chess cowboy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-31
Updated: 2021-01-31
Packaged: 2021-03-17 11:35:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29099652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperclipbitch/pseuds/paperclipbitch
Summary: They play chess, and they fuck.The two things are not the same.
Relationships: Beth Harmon/Benny Watts
Comments: 19
Kudos: 145
Collections: Start Reading





	i came to win (and i won)

**Author's Note:**

> [Title from _Married In Vegas_ by The Vamps] Okay, look, I was just in this show for the aesthetics and then my boy Thomas Brodie-Sangster rocked up all waifish and trashy and cowboy, aka my favourite character type, and then I wrote this. I can play chess but really badly, so I've kept most of the chess references vague. Anyway, have a sextet for episode six.

**_pawn._ **

Morning is a dirty mug, rinsed in the sink, that first bite of the coffee against her lips, teeth, tongue, the flare of the cigarette caught in the corner of her mouth in the bright chalky light. There are sirens in the street outside, but Beth doesn’t really hear them anymore, used to the noise and the shouting, the tap that always drips, the tacky coldness of the floor beneath her feet. She wears one of Benny’s shirts, sliding off a shoulder, and it doesn’t matter which because they’re all the fucking same, ridiculous and saturated with the smell of his cologne that costs more than his monthly rent for this shithole masquerading as an apartment.

There are too many chess sets in this place, battered cardboard boxes and glossy wooden ones, sets where the pieces are ivory and dark brown instead of white and black. Clean smooth boards and scratched boards scarred with the ghosts of old games, sharp victories and sour defeats seeping through the cracks where the squares are just starting to separate. One of these might be Benny’s first set, the scene of his first triumph, except that that would imply some kind of sentimentality, and Benny’s a whole lot of things, but not that, never that. Beth likes the click between the pieces and the board, the sure decisive snap of teeth, but this set, sprawled across the table and left out last night, has worn green baize on the bottom of each one. She juggles the pieces, her coffee and her cigarette, idly worrying at the peeling baize on the base of a pawn with her thumbnail.

In the end, she plays both as herself and Benny because he’s still asleep, an ugly sprawl of limbs and sheets on the mattress that’s not much more comfortable than the airbed. Benny might be annoyed, but she knows him better now, can slip beneath his skin to lay out his pieces. He can still surprise her but it’s less often these days. Read enough of them, watch enough of them, listen to enough of them, and you can learn the ebb and flow of a player’s games. She could force the Benny in her head to lose, or – perhaps worse – to concede, but that isn’t how you win, not for yourself and not for anyone else, and she gets herself more coffee, pins his bishop, sacrifices a pawn in the process.

The dregs of Beth’s coffee are cold and she’s colder by the time Benny rolls out of bed, hair a wreck of rumples, stupid robe half-tied crooked, baring pigeon chest and soft belly. Beth finally considers herself a moment, bent over the table, the hem of his shirt sliding up the curve of her bare ass, raised on the balls of her chilly feet, gooseflesh streaking her naked shoulders and thighs.

“Your knight’s hanging,” Benny says.

“It’s not,” Beth replies.

He leans beside her, shifts a black pawn – the colour she assigned him; of _course_ , of course – and grins down at the board, wolfish. Beth snaps back, pawn takes pawn, and Benny laughs, drifts away from the game toward the promise of making more coffee.

“It is now,” he throws over his shoulder.

 ** _bishop._**

They play chess, and they fuck.

The two things are not the same.

Benny’s an asshole about both, naturally, great at either from hours of diligent study and smug as all hell about it. Beth prefers him when the shine’s worn off a little, when something has cracked him enough to force him to focus, when his eyes stop glittering smug and shatter flinty instead, the way his mouth has of creasing and then creasing again when he’s thoughtful or annoyed or between strategies, caught on the hop.

They don’t talk about it because they save the best of their silences and their arguments for the games, the things that matter. Benny pushes her to do better, to try harder, to think more, until Beth’s teeth are thudding from her need for a drink, from something to soften the edges of everything, but, no, no booze in this obsessive basement masquerading as something halfway to a home. Benny demands everything from her, wringing her mind empty, and he pushes and pushes and pushes, all in the name of improvement, in the name of _more_. In a lot of ways, Beth thinks that he’s still punishing her for having the audacity to beat him, and then for getting a taste for it.

It’s not like Beth has much to compare this with, but Benny won’t let her lie back and watch him like he’s a vaguely interesting puzzle she’s considering swooping in to kill like Harry did. He pushes her here, too, mouth against her throat like he’s still considering ripping it out as revenge for his wounded pride, harsh breathing demanding if that’s all she’s got, to lie virgin-sweet and headlight-blind in his bed, like she hasn’t been courting the invitation for weeks. Beth knots her fingers in his hair, his _stupid_ hair, and bites a kiss out of his mouth. He slides closer, and Beth shuts her eyes and thinks about his hands, about the thousands of chess pieces that have fallen through them, every game he ever won and crowed about to admiring and jealous and annoyed competitors, and now they’re here, four pawns inside her, knight pressed to her clitoris in a way those other boys didn’t know or didn’t care about.

There’s nothing on the ceiling, just the pulsing of blood behind Beth’s eyelids, a constant and pounding blank, but she doesn’t think that she minds. There are worse things.

**_knight._ **

None of Benny’s records are worth shit, and while he claims his television set works he’s never bothered turning it on, and the books are pretty much just chess-related but for the little cluster of Sartre and Nietzsche and Kerouac that Beth has learned by now has its own currency among a certain type of boy. The bills get crammed under the door from time to time but Benny doesn’t look at them and they live on coffee and eggs and toast; Beth opens a kitchen cabinet one time and finds an abandoned tin of Crisco threatening rust and two white pawns that don’t belong to any of the apartment’s myriad sets. This could have been the kind of thing her mom might have been warning her about, or warning her against, or something: there was a brief moment when Beth was first coming down the steps to this basement when she thought Benny was going to murder her down here after all and, hell, maybe he has.

She tips his king for him, arches an eyebrow, and waits.

The greatest players have to believe in themselves because you need the strength to make a move and, sure, second-guess it, third-guess it, but you have to play it anyway or no one does a damn thing and the clock ticks down anyway. The ones with thin armour are the ones that Beth enjoys beating in a couple dozen moves, sniping away pieces until their faces collapse before their game does, irreparable damage and a stolen queen. So you build and you grow and you fashion your certainty the way you want: Beth’s seen the fastidious men with their sharp suits and absolutely straight partings, the smug men who seem to take up twice as much space at the table as their bodies actually need, the icy ones with gimlet gazes and facial features that don’t move. Benny was probably somebody before he was Benny Watts, before his attitude became a physical entity and he accessorised to match, the jewellery, the hat, the fucking _knife_ , the skinny jeans and the boots that don’t jingle with spurs but that imply they _could_ , the quickest-drawing gunslinger in the silence of a room of pencil scuffings and clock snaps. 

“You were wearing blue the first time I saw you,” he says, curled smug in the leather chair that creaks beneath him and isn’t a whole lot more comfortable than the floor. “Kind of a cute schoolgirl thing.”

“Nope,” Beth replies, without looking up from her book. She’s played these moves before – last week, and today, and a few minutes ago, but she’s trying to read them like it’s the first time over again. 

“Huh.” Benny taps one of his rings against his teeth, and he could be grinning or grimacing. “You’d think I’d remember.”

Beth isn’t convinced that he doesn’t.

“You were busy being an asshole,” she explains, and turns a page. 

“Sounds about right,” Benny says, and laughs. It rings hollow, a speed play defence with nothing behind to back it up.

**_rook._ **

“Are you,” Beth forces the breath into her lungs, tries again, “are you seriously fucking reciting _plays_ right now?”

She fists a hand in Benny’s hair, drags his head up. He’s grinning, mouth gleaming in a way that makes her flush in spite of herself. 

“You were enjoying it,” he points out, smirk spreading, the dimple that catches the corner of his mouth only when he knows he’s winning ticking alongside that moustache he wears to try and hide that beneath it is a face that never did learn to grow up.

“I thought,” Beth pushes, trying to focus, “we agreed the sex was separate from the chess.”

“It is,” Benny agrees, nips the inside of her thigh. “I didn’t say that chess was separate from sex, though.”

They don’t touch when they play, antagonise more than they flirt, occasionally smack each other’s hands away from the board if one of them’s forgotten the role they’re supposed to be tracing through. There are no rewards for winning, no stolen kisses for a clean check, no sexual favours dangled as an incentive to play well or poorly. The best Beth can hope for is the shape Benny’s mouth forms when she’s beaten him, the grim way he says _again_ or _enough_ , the way his wounded pride hunches his shoulders into something angry, something verging on panic. 

_Do you only fuck people who can beat you?_ she asked once, musing, and he gave her an incredulous look, his sweat drying on her skin, the taste of her on his tongue. _Well_ , he replied, _no, or I’d live like a fucking monk_.

Beth lets him drop his mouth back to her cunt, throw one of her legs over his shoulder, and between the darts of his tongue and the languid sucking of her clit, there’s those murmurs, the vibrations that travel through her, liquid and warm. She can only make out half of the moves, but she thinks she might actually recognise the game; she briefly considers being impressed that Benny can remember the whole thing but of course this is who they are, all they’re _really_ good for.

Later, later, they swap rapid-fire moves, knight takes pawn, connecting rooks, and Beth digs her nails into Benny’s back and ass and each mark is another notation, more conquered ground. It’s not like her childhood, not like when the green pills make the pieces skim across the ceiling, more than her and part of her all at once, eternal and ephemeral, clouds and granite. It’s something, though, the way Benny’s litany stutters when she clenches around him, gasping and sending his unprotected bishop running while she pursues, relentless, dragging him deeper into her, white and black tumbling behind her eyelids as she leaves a mess of red and purple on Benny’s skin.

Beth reads the game back later in crescents of nail marks as Benny drowses beside her, satiated and sulky at once, a draw that Beth could probably have won if he hadn’t made her come, conceding while he panted into her collarbone. They both know it, it’s in the silence, and Beth hums something to herself that isn’t in Benny’s record collection as she presses a line of pawns into the bruises on the back of his thigh, and he lets her.

**_queen._ **

There was always something magnetic about Benny, even when Beth was little more than a schoolgirl with a shitty haircut desperate to be noticed and terrified that she would be all at the same time, something bright about him that draws you closer. The cowboy hat is an affectation and the knife at best foolhardy and at worst just _embarrassing_ , and when you get right down to it, Benny is a guy with one great skill that he leans on too hard and not hard enough.

But don’t they all, really?

Chess is a game of absolutes, of black and white, of a winner and a loser. There are grandmasters and champions and a hierarchy of the greats but when you get up from the board at the end only one of you is the victor. Sure, you can draw, Beth hates that, it’s a sop, a consolation, and you both know that one of you still won, whatever the reports say. Overall, she’d prefer to play it through, each ghastly, ruinous moment, bloodied nose and loosened teeth, than keep her dignity and her shame by accepting the lifeline. 

It’s entirely possible that this is what’s happening in Benny’s excuse for an apartment, a name people say with reverence in certain circles ignoring his exposed brickwork and the linoleum peeling up off the floor and the endless tickets building up on the windshield of a car he can’t afford to drive because bringing Beth here took the last of the gas. Beth found the crack in his game and blew it apart, and now Benny is either training her to be the _best_ because that’s the only way he knows to accept her victory, or he’s somehow undermining her from within, banishing the drugs that help her visualise, hammering her with learning until she cracks or fails or peels off her skin in the middle of a tournament to reveal that she’s been him all along. 

The way he kisses her in a pool of lamplight, peels off her blouse to cup her breasts, drags her in against hips that are possibly skinnier than hers: these things are something else. They are not entirely separate from the chess coaching, and amounts of it might still be about Benny’s bruised ego, but other amounts of it are not. Beth gets the feeling that this is more unexpected for Benny than it is for her, that he isn’t used to blurring his lines, black stays black and white stays white, but Beth has always liked a strategy of passed pawns and the way you can take something small and make it something bigger and entirely different after all. 

**_king._ **

Initially, Beth thought Benny only owned chess magazines that he was on the cover of, the copy half-awed and half-scared of him, Benny’s interviews bluster and confidence and that casual assholery he specialises in, every picture smouldering and vain. All of them fit together into this mythical figure he’s made for himself and Beth would despise him more for it if she wasn’t fully aware that the poised elegant woman in photoshoots the world over is not the one lying in the empty bathtub at home, alternating pills with wine and angry tears and grief too large to ever examine fully.

Beth never wanted Benny until she beat him, until she peeled back the persona to see the man beneath, as ragged and scared as she ever was, rimed with bitterness and something that might be regret, but burning as furious and determined as anything. It’s not a Benny that many people have seen and maybe that’s the one they should have put on the covers of those chess magazines, except that Beth kind of likes that she gets to see him this way, taking himself apart and putting himself back together to try and stay one step ahead of her.

Of course, she eventually finds out that Benny has stacks of every chess magazine published, all the states ones and many from around the world. Most of the languages mean nothing to either of them, but the records of matches are the same in the world over. They trade magazines like they trade white for black and black for white, piece for piece, Benny dropping another stack in front of Beth for her day’s study, Beth pushing back the ones she already knows, the ones she’s moved past. They’re all well-thumbed, some with ballpoint annotations in the margins, but neat and tidy, ready for repeated reference use. Benny’s a shitty gambler, an inconsistent friend and presumably a godawful tenant, but he’s an all-or-nothing man, and while it’s presumably terrible to be on his nothing side, he gives chess his all, and Beth likes being caught in the reflected glow of that. She’ll glean his knowledge, and when she’s taken all that… well, who knows what will be left afterwards.

She shifts a pile of magazines to one side, picks up the next stack. She’s on the cover of the first one, looking impossibly composed, not camped out in an ex-reigning champion’s shabby flat, blouse crumpled and eyeliner smudged from aforesaid ex-champion’s thumbs. Beth’s mouth twists, rueful, and she looks up to where Benny is pacing and ranting, ranting and pacing, and she’s probably supposed to be listening gratefully to his lecture but she drifted away at some point when he started trying to tell her something she already knew. She’ll drift back in later, maybe, and he’ll cut his eyes at her like he’s trying to remember why he asked her here in the first place.

Of course she skips the interview, the insipid words the journalists pick for her that never seem to have any substance to them and never seem to really resemble what she actually said, the glossy photograph of her that no longer feels like her, even scant years later. They’ve printed one of her games, and she frowns down to automatically scrutinise, see if she’s given more of herself away to potential future opponents than she meant to, to see if she can find an error that she’ll never make again. Looking at the letters and numbers, she reaches absently to smooth the dogeared corner of the page, and then frowns. Sees how the corner was neatly and deliberately folded. Just this one.

Beth has been looking at this arrangement the way she looks at everything else in her life, working under the assumption that there would be a winner and a loser, a triumph and a loss, someone moving forward and someone staying put. Benny almost certainly is too, either determined to unveil a Frankenstein built of his chess knowledge and chunks of his ego to justify how much it hurt letting her take them in the first place, or quietly building her armour built of secret flaws that will crack to dust the moment she sets her foot on one on a public stage. It’s really the only way either of them know how to function anymore.

Still, whatever ends up breaking as a result of these frantic potentially disastrous weeks, Beth is starting to think that it might not be her.


End file.
